Authors: Eric Weiner
Finally, the hour late, my head fuzzy from the wine, I decide to ask Alicia a time-travel question. If she could transport herself to Athens circa 450 BC, who would she want to share a bottle of wine with? I fully expect her to say Socrates. The Dude.
“Aspasia,” says Alicia.
“Who was he?”
“She. Aspasia was the consort of Pericles.”
In the classics, we hear little about the women of Athens, and what we do hear is not exactly positive. The best a woman could achieve, it was said, was to be neither seen nor heard.
Such anonymity was not for Aspasia, though. She was seen, and definitely heard. She is rumored to have written some of Pericles’s speeches, including his famous Funeral Oration. Aspasia was a feminist about twenty-four hundred years before feminism and the unsung hero of the Athenian flourishing. As I would later discover, these sort of invisible helpers are essential to a golden age. These are people who work behind the scenes, sometimes quite heroically, to make genius happen.
“The people of Athens feared her,” says Alicia, her tone of voice belying that, as far as she is concerned, that was a good thing. A very good thing.
The next morning my alarm clock goes off and I curse Plato. He was a brilliant philosopher, one of the greatest thinkers of all time, but he also
invented the water clock, an ingenious but diabolical device that utilized water pressure to sound an alarm. Plato’s clock was also used to time political meetings; thus the common complaint about long-winded orators who gave speeches that were “nine gallons long.”
Plato’s water clock represents a rare example of Greek technology. Today we associate innovation almost exclusively with technology, but that was not the case in Ancient Greece. They had slaves to perform menial tasks and so had little incentive to invent time-saving devices. Pursuing new technologies was considered “trivial and unworthy,” says Armand D’Angour, a classicist at Oxford University. To be a tinkerer or inventor in ancient Athens was to be relegated to the lowest rung on the social ladder, and to toil anonymously.
The
kleroterion
, for instance, was an ingenious device, used to randomly select jurors, yet nowhere do we find even a mention of the inventor’s name, let alone any Steve Jobsian folklore surrounding him. Should a Silicon Valley technokind suddenly materialize in ancient Athens, he would be treated like any other craftsman, with a puny salary, no recognition, and, when his back was turned, a derisive sneer. He was working with his hands, making
things
; he was not a warrior or an athlete or a thinker. An ancient-Greek Steve Jobs would have died penniless and unsung.
I turn off the snooze button—a feature that never occurred to the genius Plato—and scramble downstairs to the Bridge, where I annex a table, order a coffee, and plan my attack du jour on the Great Athenian Mystery. Socrates, I’m beginning to suspect, holds the key. He claimed neither wisdom nor followers. All he did was ask a lot of annoying questions. Just like me, I think, and smile. Yes, a conversation seems fittingly Socratic, but with whom?
Brady.
You must call Brady
. That’s what everyone says. If you want to understand Socrates and Athens, ancient or otherwise, Brady is your man, they assure me.
Every city has a Brady. Often the Brady is an expat, but not always. Sometimes the Brady is a local. Either way, the Brady has so absorbed the sinew and marrow of a place, so thoroughly inhaled its essence, that
it’s impossible to discern where the place ends and the Brady begins. For someone such as myself, trying to grasp a place as complex and confounding as Athens, a Brady is indispensable.
So I call the Brady, who turns out to be a former US diplomat, and a kind of genius, too. He invites me to his apartment, to a symposium. Well, okay, it’s a dinner party, but since this particular dinner party is taking place in the storied Plaka district of Athens and not, say, Brooklyn, I prefer to call it a symposium because, let’s face it,
symposium
sounds a lot more intriguing than
dinner party
. It certainly sounds more Greek.
The
symposium—
literally “to drink together”—was a centerpiece of life in old Athens, and Socrates was a regular. Food was served, but that was almost beside the point. The main draw was the entertainment, which consisted of “anything from good talk and intellectual puzzle games to music, dancing girls, and similar titillations,” notes historian Robert Flacelière. No symposium, though, was complete without wine, and lots of it. The Greeks had some funny ideas about alcohol, as they did about so many things. Aristotle believed that consuming too much wine made you fall on your face, while too much beer landed you on your back, and for reasons not immediately clear, the Greeks always diluted their wine—five parts water to two parts wine, mixed in a large bowl called a krater.
Which brings us to one possible explanation for Athenian genius: the booze. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds. Alcohol and creativity have long been linked in the public imagination, and in the imagination of inebriated writers and artists down through the ages. William Faulkner said he wasn’t able to face the blank page without a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Many painters, from van Gogh to Jackson Pollock, liked a swig or four while working. Winston Churchill claims he could not have written
The World Crisis
, his five-volume memoir, without his muse, booze. Indeed, some call this alcohol-fueled productivity the “Churchill gene.” There is no evidence such a gene actually exists, but researchers have identified a genetic variation, called the G-variant, which causes alcohol to act more like an opioid drug, such as morphine, in some people. Theoretically (and it is only a theory), this genetic peculiarity lubricates the wheels of creative
thinking in some individuals but not others. Or, as Mark Twain put it, “My vices protect me but they would assassinate you!”
You’d think there would be boatloads of research investigating the connection between alcohol and creative genius, given the enormous interest in the subject, not to mention the plethora of willing volunteers, yet I am able to find surprisingly few empirical studies. Nevertheless, a few brave researchers have bellied up to the laboratory.
To understand the significance of the research, we need to step back and examine the four stages of the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Alcohol affects each of these stages differently. One study, by Swedish psychologist Torsten Norlander, found that alcohol consumption facilitates the incubation stage—that is, when you’re not actively trying to solve a problem but, instead, allow it to marinate, letting your unconscious have a crack at it—but impairs the verification stage. In other words, you may come up with brilliant ideas but you won’t be able to recognize them.
In another study, psychologists at the University of Illinois served twenty volunteers a moderate amount of alcohol, vodka and cranberry juice. They cut off the volunteers when their blood-alcohol levels reached 0.075 percent, or just below the legal limit for driving. These moderately sloshed volunteers, along with a control group of twenty sober participants, were then given a test that measures divergent thinking—again, an important aspect of creativity.
The results, published in the journal
Consciousness and Cognition
, are enough to make you reach for a drink. The sober men took, on average, 15.4 seconds to come up with a creative response, but the vodka drinkers needed only 11.5 seconds. Later the researchers asked the volunteers (presumably after they sobered up) how they approached the task. The inebriated group tended to describe their approach as “intuitive,” while the sober group used words like “analytical.” The study provides the first empirical evidence of something we have long suspected: alcohol decreases inhibition and, for some at least, opens creative channels otherwise shuttered.
Two key questions, though, remain unanswered: Which people and how much alcohol? What the researchers didn’t do was conduct the same experiment but this time with double, or triple, the amount of alcohol consumed. I’m willing to bet they would get different results, that the creativity boost witnessed at lower levels of alcohol consumption would evaporate.
The ancient Greeks certainly thought so. Not only did they dilute their wine, but they served it in shallow cups, designed to encourage sipping rather than gulping.
Finally, I make my way across the stone streets of the Plaka neighborhood and, after a few wrong turns, find Brady’s apartment. It is cozy and well-worn. Troves of books in several languages, living and dead, occupy prime real estate in every room, including the bathroom. Brady is smart. Scary smart. He begins sentences with phrases like “I was just reading Lysias this morning in the original Greek.” My sentences do not begin that way. More likely they begin with “I was updating my Facebook status this morning, in the original English.”
The guests arrive and our symposium unfolds exactly like an ancient Greek one, only without the dancing girls or the slaves serving food and diluting the wine. That last detail proves crucial, because without someone cutting the wine (or the mojitos or the gin and tonics) a symposium can quickly degenerate into a drunken blur. Indeed, that’s precisely what happens. Many profound conversations may have transpired that evening, but I can’t recall a single one. Except the light. Someone said, “The light is different here in Athens,” and everyone nodded. Also, someone mentioned Socrates. Or was it Plato? Like I said, no one was cutting the wine, so the evening might as well have transpired entirely in ancient Greek.
The next morning, once properly hydrated, I call Brady and he agrees to meet again, this time sans alcohol. Sitting at a café near his house, I am grateful that the sky is unexpectedly overcast, with a light rain falling. Hangovers and severe Athenian light do not mix. I’m also grateful for this second chance with Brady and his smartness. I’m hoping to find answers to questions, or at least better questions, as Socrates would say.
The café, while no Bridge, is pleasant nonetheless. Most of the tables
are arranged outdoors under a large awning, the entire ambience infused with an unspoken understanding:
Come, weary traveler. Order a coffee, one will suffice, and sit all day.
Brady explains how his first love was archaeology. This makes sense. I can tell already that he is naturally shy, more comfortable among ancient ruins than living people. Archaeology is the perfect profession for people like Brady, and Aristotle. Rocks and skeletal remains tell stories, sometimes wondrous stories, but they do not make eye contact or small talk or ask you what you’re doing Tuesday evening.
I tell Brady about my search for the circumstances of genius. He takes a sip of his espresso and gazes into the distance, ignoring the tourists on Segways motoring past us, trailing their guide like a flock of helmeted geese.
Does Brady think I’m on track, or a complete idiot—in the modern, not the ancient-Greek, usage? He doesn’t say, and his face reveals nothing. Just like Socrates, who was famously poker-faced, and much admired for it.
I reach into my satchel and show Brady a few of the books I’m reading. He nods, neither approving nor censuring, but merely acknowledging that, yes, these are the usual suspects. I show him one book, though, called
The Greeks and the New
. “I haven’t heard of that one,” he says, and I feel a twinge of victory. I have surprised Brady. I know this because the expression on his face remains completely unchanged.
Brady has lived in Israel, Morocco, and Armenia, picking up languages the way most of us pick up lint. Athens, though, stole his heart. How could it not? In Athens, the past is closer than it is elsewhere, and Brady never tires of that nearness. He still visits the museums occasionally, he says.
I confess that I have a museum problem. I don’t like them. Never have. Large and intimidating, they seem designed to invoke feelings of inadequacy: guilt factories disguised as cultural institutions. Brady is sympathetic: “It takes a long time to appreciate museums. First you have to study archaeology for a long time, then you have to forget it for a long time. Then you can go to a museum.”
That is, I realize, a very Greek thing to say. The ancients believed that
knowledge was good but recognized the dangers of its reckless, indiscriminate accumulation. They possessed a “shiny ignorance,” as Alicia called it. None was shinier than that of Socrates. “The only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing,” he said.
Some twenty-five hundred years since Socrates uttered those words, social scientists have begun to investigate whether he was onto something. One researcher has focused on a rare neurological disorder known as anosognosia, in which a person who suffers from a disability—paralysis, typically—remains completely unaware of his or her disability. If you put a glass of water in front of the right hand of people with anosognosia and ask them to pick it up, they won’t do it. If you ask them why, they’ll say they’re tired or they’re not thirsty. The damage to their brain that caused their paralysis also leaves them unaware of their paralysis.
David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, uses anosognosia as a metaphor to explain the research he’s done on ignorance. In a series of studies, he and his colleague Justin Kruger tested a group of undergraduates in such skills as logical reasoning, grammar, and humor. They then showed each participant his results and asked him to estimate how he fared compared to others. The people who did well on the exams estimated their rank accurately. No great surprise there. What is surprising is that those who didn’t do well on the exams were convinced they did. They weren’t dissembling. They simply were unable to assess their competence, or as Dunning, in an interview with the filmmaker Errol Morris, put it, “We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.”
That’s because the skills we need to solve a problem are the very skills we need to realize we can’t solve it. It’s the intellectual equivalent of anosognosia, and this phenomenon, now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, explains a lot. It explains why most people consider themselves above-average drivers, a statistical impossibility. (
Somebody
has to be below average.) It also explains, I think, why more of us aren’t geniuses. The first step in any breakthrough is realizing that a breakthrough is necessary, realizing that your knowledge is imperfect. Those who possess this “thoroughly conscious ignorance,” as the Scottish physicist James Clerk
Maxwell put it, are more likely to achieve creative breakthroughs than those who are convinced they have it all figured out.